Editors' Review

Diagrams can often organize information and get your point across in ways that text alone just can't. yEd Graph Editor is an easy-to-use tool that lets you create diagrams, flow charts, and many other visual representations of processes and relationships. It's a fairly sophisticated program and new users might have to spend some time getting acquainted with it, but the payoff -- an endless number of graphic possibilities -- is well worth it.

yEd Graph Editor has an attractive interface, with a tabbed work area that lets you have multiple files open at once. Several aspects of the interface are modular, allowing you to close them when not needed. An overview module shows a broad overview of the graph, while the neighborhood view shows details of a selected area, and structure view shows graph items in a tree hierarchy. The palette allows you to choose from a wide variety of shapes and connecting lines, and there are objects including people, computer networking hardware, UML objects, and more. Charts can be saved in a variety of image formats, as well as PDF and HTML files. We found it easy to get started with yEd Graph Editor, but referring to the built-in Help file provided us with plenty of thorough instructions for making the most of the program. We think that yEd Graph Editor is a great choice for anyone needing to create a graphic representation of information, be it a family tree, decision tree, flow chart, organizational chart, user instructions, or any number of other possibilities.

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Publisher's Description

Use yEd to create flow charts, UML diagrams, mind maps, and many other kinds of diagrams, graphs, and networks. Choose from a wide range of highly sophisticated layout algorithms to automatically arrange your diagrams in no time. An intuitive and visually appealing user interface makes creating diagrams fun. Once you are done with creating a diagram you can save, print, or export it to popular formats like PDF, SWF, EMF, SVG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, or HTML image maps, HTML Flash Viewer.

You can draw graphs with this tool. You can add node groups, nodes, edges, and you can label all of those things. There is a slight snap to another nodes/groups on the graph, you can use that by positioning nodes very well. You have many different node styles, edge styles, etc... on the palette. You have many edge routing styles. You have many automatic layouts.

Cons

It lacks many of basic features you expect from a professional editor, for example the toolbar is incomplete, you cannot set the keyboard mapping, etc...I have always the feeling this is a version 0.5, not the 3.11, because it is so incomplete. There is snap, but no snap to grid, the is grouping but you cannot move nodes across the groups, the automatic layouts almost never considering groups, and edge labels despite the settings, so if you want to use groups and edge labels you have to place the nodes and set the group sizes manually.It is slow by medium size graphs and it gets worse by large graphs.

Summary

I usually work with a manually created grid which consist of nodes or groups in a straight line, so I can the whole graph snap to grid from outside to the inner sections. After that I use automatic edge routing and position the edge labels manually if necessary. Automatic layouts are working well only by trees. By real graphs they are awful.

The basics are good in this editor, better as in many of editors I worked.

You can draw graphs with this tool. You can add node groups, nodes, edges, and you can label all of those things. There is a slight snap to another nodes/groups on the graph, you can use that by positioning nodes very well. You have many different node styles, edge styles, etc... on the palette. You have many edge routing styles. You have many automatic layouts.

But there are many things which make me think, this is an incomplete editor and should have version 0.5 instead of 3.11.

The default settings are not so good:- the label of a newly created node is not edited by default,- the node is not fit to label by default,- the bridge label is not tunnel by default,- the default color of snap lines is almost the same than the background.You cannot set the keyboard configuration as well, the default is bad by view commands, for example you zoom with "numpad (+)", not with "ctrl & numpad(+)". This can be a pain by typing labels which contain those symbols.You cannot edit toolbar. There are no toolbar icons for different menu points:- layout types- edge routing types.You can dock them, but that is not the same, if you want to change layout style fast. You do not hide the unavailable layout styles, you display error messages instead of that.There were poor choices of design which are worsening the user experience: - you cannot snap to grid, then why is the grid anyways?!- you cannot move the selected nodes/groups to any existing group, you can only group and ungroup them, - most of the layout styles do not consider groups,- the layout styles do not consider edge labels by node positioning, edge lengths, etc... the result is usually a mess which you have to clear manually, I tried many hours to make a single layout work, there are many settings, but I could not find anything working well in my case, after that I decided to do it manually, and I was done in 5 mins, so automatic layouts are in alpha stage I think...- the edge label positioning do not consider groups, another edge labels, another edges, it puts labels usually on borders of the groups, or too near to another edge or edge label...

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